Best Technical SEO Tips for Improving Website Search Ranking

Developing quality content and optimizing the same for browser searches constitute SEO basics. Here are some vital technical SEO tips on how to optimize your website to remain top in the rankings.

The main purpose for search engine optimization is to enhance user experience onsite. You can enhance your websites performance by making use of search engine analytics tool. All the major search engines have their analytics tools. Anyhow, this article is about some technical SEO issues to avoid in order to give your site the best survival chance.

SEO Cloaking

Cloaking involves webpages showing differently for different users. This is one concern you should look out for because search engines don’t like SEO cloaked websites. So, just for the sake of your website, avoid cloaking and hidden links because they attract dire penalties.

Webpage redirects

When it comes to webpage redirects, it is only fitting that you do them appropriately. If not done well, this might compromise a website’s overall performance. For temporary change in URLs, it is advisable to use 302 redirects while 301 redirects are best for permanent URL and domain changes.

It is crucial to remember that sneaky page redirects may attract ranking penalties. Bad redirects may also mean issues with link equity and filtering of duplicate pages. All these might impact your search engine rankings. If you can, just avoid page redirects altogether.

Content duplication

Google’s panda algorithm penalizes for any content duplication. This is because it confuses search engines on the pages to index and rank if similar content appears on multiple pages. This implies that only one URL is allowed per content. Any content duplication would mean the search engine has to pick on what is most appropriate and filter out the rest.

For internal content duplication, like is the case when many URLs lead to the same content, you just need to delete and make use of 301 redirects to the original page. Alternatively, you can use canonical tags.

Custom 404 error page

This is the page the will help your visitors at their point of need; when the page they are seeking doesn’t seem to exist. You will need to create your own custom 404 error page and use the same to steer visitors to other relevant pages. That is to say you include relevant links and other options in the page. While creating a custom 404 error page, it is critical that you own the page. Make it resemble your other webpages in terms of color, font and general layout.

Once created, you will need to set up that new page as your 404 error page. This will depend on the website server you are using; Apache, Microsoft, WordPress etc. Note however, that some website hosts strictly do not allow set up of custom 404 error pages.

Plagiarism

This is an online visibility killer. Avoid copying other people’s content and using on site without their permission. Plagiarism might even cause your webpages to be filtered out of search engine results pages. It is in fact a capital online offence, if there is such a thing.

The good news however, is that there are online tools that can help you with this problem. There are more than enough online plagiarism checking tools. Use these to ensure that your content is unique, lest you be penalized for plagiarism. Copyscape and Google’s Exact-Match Search are but a few of the commonly used tools.

These technical SEO tips will help your webpages rank well in the search results. Take advantage of these tips to ensure your website attracts huge traffic.

Determining the Best Link Building Strategy for Your Website

Promoting a website is as important as building it, but how to promote it is a very confusing task. There is no best strategy for promoting a website. Just like humans, each website is a different entity with a different set of treatment for every problem.

A large number of sites have shown that even after implementing great techniques, they failed to promote it to masses and a blunder on social media gave them the highest hit rate ever. So, from the best techniques to the greatest blunders, you never know the activity, which will generate maximum traffic for your website.

However, there is a slow and steady way to achieve a huge hit rate and public acceptance. This is called link building, which connects to a large number of users and portals to generate traffic for your website.

Here is a list of all the link-building techniques that you can use in order to gather a huge customer support for your website.

Blog Commenting

You can leave comments on successful blogs with a huge hit rate. These comments should be strictly on the topic. You can add your link at the end, but the major portion of the comment should be consistent with the blog.

Guest Posting

You can write a guest post on another website or blog and give a referral link to your blog at the end in the bio section. Make sure that you do not describe your company or product in the guest post. The guest post should be an informative article and you should stick to the topic of the blog. Make sure that others too write guest posts on your blog.

Strategic Content

When writing content or creating audio visual content make sure that the content can be pushed on other platforms like social media as well. The content should be easy to transform for all kinds of digital media.

Social Media Referrals

This is the biggest social media tool. The technique of referring your site on social media platforms is old. There is another step added to it, after posting about the site you have to either get it endorsed by a celebrity or by large masses. It gives your content a huge outreach, which is the basis of a great conversion rate.

Testimonials

One good tool to promote the site or blog is to write testimonials. It is also a two-way stream, you not only write testimonials, but you also have to be written about. If you are writing testimonials and people are not writing in return, it will not be a fruitful exercise.

A large number of blog writers and digital marketing experts feel that there is no best strategy to promote a website. Any one of the following strategies might work and give great results.

However, in case you are not getting huge response. You should focus on all the strategies until one of them gives you an exceptionally great result. You should never be prejudiced about a single technique.

What is Search Engine Optimization? Search Engine Glossary for superior understanding about SEO

Search-Engine-Optimization (SEO)[/caption]

What is Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the exercise of growing the amount and superiority of traffic to website through organic search engine results. Search engine optimization is exactly how it sounds: optimizing your website’s content for search engines. That way Google (and other search engines) can easily index your content, categorize each of your pages based on the information they contain, and then serve those pages up to people who are looking for that information on the Internet.

How Search Engines Works

Crawling: A search engine runs a software program called a “spider” to discover content on the web.

Indexing: The search engine analyzes the content it finds to determine what it’s about, then indexes it–or organizes the content–so that it’s quickly retrieved when the next step occurs.

Querying: When you conduct a search online, the search engine fetches a list of results for you to consider. These search results appear on a SERP, or a Search Engine Results Page. As Google puts it, “…our algorithms look up your search terms in the index to find the appropriate pages.”

To recognize what SEO actually means, let's check below:

Quality of traffic. You can attract all the visitors in the world, but if they're coming to your site because Google tells them you're a resource for WordPress Tips when really your website providing WordPress Tips information, that is not quality traffic. Instead you want to attract visitors who are genuinely interested in products that you offer by SERP.

Quantity of traffic. Once you have the right people clicking through from those search engine results pages (SERPs), more traffic is superior.

Organic results. Ads make up an important part of many SERPs. Organic traffic is any traffic that you don't have to pay for.

In This post which is aboutSearch Engine Glossary willhelp you enhanced understand some of the terms normally used in the SEO industry.

404 Error Page

The web page that displays when a user tries to view a page that no longer exists or the page file name has changed.

Bounce rate

The percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page

Abandonment Rates

Percentage of site visitors who view a page and then exit without linking to other pages on the site.

Alt tags

More correctly, these are ALT “attributes” (e.g. IMG is a “tag”). This is text coded in the HTML that associates words with web graphics.

Back Links

The number of links pointing to a website, “link popularity”.

Cache

Web content saved by the search engines in their indexes.

Call-To-Action

A way to engage the website visitor that encourages them to interact with the company.

Cloaking

At the same URL (web address) showing one page to a search engine spider and a different page to a human visitor. Frowned upon by search engines as deceptive, sites may be severely penalized by the engines if they use cloaking.

Crawler-based search engines

Engines that use automated software to index the billions of files online.

Conversion

When a website visitor takes a desired action, such as a sale or downloads a file.

CTR (Click through Rate)

Percentage of users who click an online ad after viewing it.

Directories

Websites that list other sites by category, e.g. Yahoo! Directory. Historically, directories typically listed entries on people or businesses, and their contact information; such directories are still in use today. A web directory includes entries about websites, including links to those websites, organized into categories and subcategories.

Flash

Macromedia software that creates vector-based graphic animations with small file sizes for use online.

Framed site

Using a specific type of HTML code that places “pages inside pages”. Has significant disadvantages and a few advantages.

H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 tags

In HTML, the code used to define a page title or subhead.

HTML Text

Text on a web page that is created using HTML (which can be indexed by the engines) as opposed to a graphic (which cannot).

Hyperlinks

A link from one web page to another (links can also point to another location on the same page).

Website Indexing

Online content that the search engines can index. Some website contents are not indexing by(e.g. locked PDF files, text in a graphic, Robots.txt Blocking).

JavaScript

A programming script used on websites.

Keyword Stemming

Keyword stemming is a useful tool for web pages and search engine optimization. The process of keyword stemming involves taking a basic but popular keywords to a particular website and adding a prefix, suffix, or pluralization to make the keyword into a new word. Google searches not only for your search terms, but also for words that are similar to some or all of those terms, including plurals.

Link Popularity

The number of links pointing to a website.Link popularity refers to the number of Backlinks (incoming links) that point to a given website. Link popularity is a term that refers to how many other links point towards a particular website. The term link popularity also has two different forms, Internal and External, which refer to the links coming from the websites own web pages and from other websites. Internal link popularity means the number of links to the website from web pages that belong to the particular website. External link popularity is the number of links from outside sources that lead back to the particular website. In the end, websites with high link popularity have what is called link superiority and have a reputation for being informative, as well as ranking highly on search engines. Link popularity is also an approach that many search engines take when deciding where to rank websites.

Meta Description

HTML code that contains a descriptive sentence or two about the web page.The meta description is a ~160 character snippet, a tag in HTML, that summarizes a page's content. Search engines show the meta description in search results mostly when the searched for phrase is contained in the description. Optimizing the meta description is a very important aspect of on-page SEO.

Natural Listings

That part of the search engine results that is not paid for, typically in the central area of the results page.

Off-The-Page

Factors considered by the search engines when ranking a page that are not part of the web page, e.g. back links.

On-The-Page

Factors considered by the search engines when ranking a page that are part of the web page, e.g. text content, title text, etc.

Organic Listings

Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms, as opposed to their being advertisements. In contrast, non-organic search results may include pay per click advertising.

Page Rank

Devised by Google, it measures not only how many links point to a website, but the “quality” of the sites providing the links.

Page Views

The number of requests to view a specific web page in a specific time frame (the same person could make multiple requests).

Paid Inclusion

Paying money to be listed in a search engine or online directory. Paid inclusion is a search engine marketing product where the search engine company charges fees related to inclusion of websites in their search index. The use of paid inclusion is controversial and paid inclusion's popularity has decreased over time among search engines.

Paid Placement

Paying money to have an advertisement shown on a search engine results page. Paid placement is a program in which advertisers' listings are guaranteed to appear on a Results Page when particular Keywords are searched. The ranking of paid placement listings is determined by competitive bidding.

Phrase Match

Performing a search with quotation marks around the phrase so that the search results will show web pages with the exact phrase.

Pop-up Ads

A form of online advertising that opens a new web browser window to display advertisements.

PPC “Pay per Click”

Paying a small amount each time a user clicks on an online ad.

Redirect

A file on the server indicating that the requested page has permanently (301) or temporarily (302) been moved to another location.

Robots.txt

A text file that instructs the search engines about pages or directories to exclude from its database.

ROI “Return on Investment”

How much revenue is generated compared to how much was spent on a marketing campaign

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

The practice of marketing and advertising through the search engines.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Designing a website so that it ranks highly in the search engines when someone searches for specific phrases related to the site.

Search Engine Rankings

The position a site has on a search results page when a specific phrase is searched for.

Search Engine Referrals

Visitors who arrive at a website after clicking a link on a search engine results page.

Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

The page that displays in a search engine when a specific phrase is searched for.

Search Term

The word or words entered by the user into the search engine.

Similar Pages

Identifies sites that the search engines think are the same theme.

Title Tag

In HTML, an area where text is placed that shows at the very top of the browser window. Search engines consider this area critical.

Unique Visitors

The number of individuals who visit a website during a specific time (the same person visiting twice is only counted once).

Web Spider

Software that browses the Web in an automated manner and keeps a copy of visited pages in its database. Also known also as a crawler.

Webinar

Online seminar that may contain audio and video.

Search Engine Saturation

The number of web pages that a search engine has indexed from your website.

Search Engines

A system designed to make searching the web easier. The searcher types in a query and this results in a page is full of various relevant media types (text, imagery, video, etc.). Popular examples include Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Algorithm

The procedures or formulas that establish computer programs. Examples = search engines use algorithms to find the right results for a search query. An image editing program would use an algorithm to process the image’s data.

Bing

The search engine developed by Microsoft. It provides a basic web search, as well as a more focused search around categories such as images, shopping, news, maps, etc.

PageRank

Google’s ranking software that determines how relevant a web page is based on a search query. It calculates both the number of incoming links and the quality of these links.

SEO: Search Engine Optimization

The process of getting on the results page from a search query through free/organic means. This includes producing quality content and incorporating long-tail keywords in effective ways.

Black Hat SEO

More aggressive methods of optimization that focus on taking advantage of the more technical side of searching rather than focusing on user behavior. This goes against what SEO is intended to do and can cause your site to be penalized. Examples = keyword stuffing, Hidden text, doorway pages. (Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamming. This is for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending visitors to a different page.)

Keyword

A word or phrase which has been identified as the one that people would use when searching for that subject matter in the search query. There are ways to optimize keywords such as through SEO

Keyword Stuffing

The method of filling a web page with numerous keywords in order to rank higher on a search results page. Doing this make the words appear unnatural since they aren’t necessarily appropriate in the phrase when overused. This is considered an ineffective SEO tactic and Google now punishes a website through lowering their ranking if the algorithm detects this practice.

Long-Tail Keywords

Phrases, usually three to four words that are most pertinent to what is being sold. These are identified by analyzing what a searcher might type in their search query if they were looking for a specific product or service.

Local Search

Using geographic areas as a factor in search engine results so that the product or service comes from a certain location in regards to the user.

Starting of a Business website and tech blog is vital for a perfect growth, while foundation of an online business depends on the hosting services. Since, an online presence has become a must for all types of businesses, thus the choice of the best web hosting company is also crucial. Among many web hosting companies present today, making a choice of the best host depends on various factors listed below. You must read our in in depth beginner’s guide to web hosting.

Selecting the right web host company can be an arduous task. This is more so particularly when you have little experience in this field.When choosing a hosting service, it’s important to not only consider the price but the quality as well. Selecting a professional web hosting company is vital for your website since the quality of service will influence long-term results.

Cost of Service Package

The cost is definitely a significant factor when selecting a hosting package. So, do a little research prior to choosing a web hosting service.

The Overall Management

When you are not familiar with web programming, you should look for hosting packages that will provide you with the possibility to administrate your web site with dedicated interface (Webmin, cPanel among others). A number of applications used in cPanel, for instance, are free and provide a lot of facilities. Don’t forget to ask your chosen provider the installation process when buying a hosting package.

Space & Scalability

The basic service that a web hosting company provides is a space on the web for hosting different websites. The availability of the amount of space and bandwidth according to a hosting plan is a vital point to be considered. Web hosting companies like Hostgator, Webhostingbuzz and Roboshift do a good job at providing unlimited bandwidth, as websites/companies expand and grow in the future.

Number of accounts per server

If it’s a shared server, it’s recommended to be aware of the number of sites that you’ll be sharing the same server with. When there are several web sites on the server, your website has greater chances of loading slowly. You should compare the number of accounts on the server with the number of accounts used by other web hosting companies to have a strong starting negotiation point.For dedicated servers, always ask if upgrades will be performed – memory, hard disk and CPU among others. Don’t forget to ask your chosen professional IT services provider about your site’s downtime in the event that an upgrade is performed.

Website Speed

After hosting a website, the prime feature that binds a user to the website is the speed at which its web pages load. A website should load within seconds or the visitor will move away from the website. So, before buying a plan, ensure that the hosting company uses a high-speed connection to allow your website to show up faster.

Security

Faster loading is an essential feature, but it is useless if your website isn’t secure. A fast website might attract a lot of visitors, but the lack of security features will force most of them to leave the site. So, the host must have plans that offer high security for the personal, financial and private data transferred while access to the site by using secure servers like SSL and others. There is a great video on Youtube that explains SSL that you should check out.

Technical Support

The demand of technical support for the customers or clients of a company is in high skies these days. This facilitates the clients of the company to get quick resolutions for any technical issue encountered, while accessing the service. The company should provide a high quality and convenient support service to solve customers’ queries, available round the clock.

Control Panel

Although a web hosting company is available to assist you in all aspects, but it isn’t always feasible to contact the host. So, the provider must offer a control panel for you to modify or update your website on your own. The panel must offer an easy interface to the website owner.

Email Capabilities

Every business needs dedicated email addresses to be used for different business activities. Thus, before selecting a web hosting company, you must check with the availability of email addresses, amount and ability for aliases use and auto responding ability. File size restrictions are also vital to be considered for receiving and sending files.

Add-on Features

The need of online presence for a business and the use of internet services or a website for other purposes has gradually increased. This increasing requirement of websites has led to an increase of the number of web hosts tightening the competition levels. So, to attract more customers, many companies offer various additional features. You must look for a company offering the best services including both the basic and add-on features.Here’s hoping that the above factors will serve as your guide in considering the right web hosting company.All of these tips will help to make lighter work of choosing the most suitable and affordable web hosting service.

Geo targeting or geographic target setting is the option for webmasters to link targeted geographic location of traffic to their sites in Webmaster Tools account. This helps Google to determine the search results for a specific geographic location.

Geographic setting is one of the tools Google uses to determine the top search results for a particular country hence Google search results will vary from country to country for the same keywords.

Domains and Geographic Settings

All the country specific domains like .us (Unites States), .in (India) or .ca (Canada) are by default linked to a particular country and hence there will not be an additional geographic targeting option required for these domains. This means for country specific domains you will not see a “Geographic Target” setting option in your Google Webmaster Tools.

The generic top level domains like .com, .net, .info or .org are not linked with any countries in specific. Hence Google provides an option to add a geographic target for the webmasters owning a generic top level domain.

If there is no geographic location set for a generic top level domain site in Webmaster Tools account then Google uses various other data like server location and information on Google Places before displaying it in the search result pages. If your site is not linked with any geography and you changed your hosting provider then it is recommended that you inform Google about the new location of your server through geographic target setting. This will help Google to re-determine the position of your site in the search results for geographically restricted searches.

How to Set a Geographic Target?

1. Login to your Webmaster Tools account and select the site. You need to have your site verified successfully in order to use this option.

2. Go to 'Search Traffic'

3. Click on 'International Targeting'

4. Set the Geographic target by selecting the country from the drop-down.

Select “choice country” if you do not want to link your site with any of the geographic locations.

WordPress is an amazing CMS platform, but it can also be quite slow if not optimized correctly. In this guide, we will show you how to speed up WordPress by sharing our web performance strategies and recommendations.

Why Speed is Important for Your WordPress Site?

Studies show that from 2000 to 2016, the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds to 7 seconds.

What does this mean for you as a website owner?

You have very little time to show users your content and convince them to stay on your website.

A slow website means users will potentially leave your website before it even loads.

According to a StrangeLoop case study that involved Amazon, Google, and other larger sites, a 1 second delay in page load time can lead to 7% loss in conversions, 11% fewer page views, and 16% decrease in customer satisfaction.

How To Speed Up WordPress

As a side note, these are not ordered by importance or any criteria, I’ve just gathered everything We’ve learned around how to speed up WordPress page loads and listed them all here.

Choose a good Webhost

When starting out, a shared host might seem like a bargain (“Unlimited page views!”). It comes at another cost: incredibly slow site speed and frequent down time during high traffic periods.

If you plan on publishing popular stuff, you’re killing yourself by running your WordPress site on shared hosting.

The stress of your site going down after getting a big feature is enough to create a few early gray hairs: don’t be a victim, invest in proper hosting.

You might be surprised to here this, but the Twenty Fifteen “framework” (aka the default WP theme) is lightweight and quite speedy.

That’s because they keep the “guts” simple; compare that to bloated frameworks which have tons of features that you will never use, slowing your site to a crawl.

Utilize Caching

Caching is another important factor when it comes to speeding up WordPress. Caching stores your pages and posts as static files which are then served to your visitors, reducing the processing load on your server.

You can utilize caching by using WordPress caching plugins, implementing browser caching, and server-side caching.

Use a content delivery network (CDN)

All of your favorite big blogs are making use of this, and if you are into online marketing using WordPress (as I’m sure many of my readers are) you won’t be surprised to here that some of your favorite blogs like Copyblogger are making use of CDN’s.

Essentially, a CDN, or content delivery network, takes all your static files you’ve got on your site (CSS, Javascript and images etc) and lets visitors download them as fast as possible by serving the files on servers as close to them as possible.

Optimize images (automatically)

Yahoo! has an image optimizer called Smush.it that will drastically reduce the file size of an image, while not reducing quality.

However, if you are like me, doing this to every image would be beyond a pain, and incredibly time consuming.

Fortunately, there is an amazing, free plugin called WP-SmushIt which will do this process to all of your images automatically, as you are uploading them. No reason not to install this one.

Optimize your homepage to load quickly

This isn’t one thing but really a few easy things that you can do to ensure that your homepage loads quickly, which probably is the most important part of your site because people will be landing there the most often.

Things that you can do include:

Show excerpts instead of full posts

Reduce the number of posts on the page (between 5-7)

Remove unnecessary sharing widgets from the home page (include them only in posts)

Remove inactive plugins and widgets that you don’t need Keep in minimal! Readers are here for content, not 8,000 widgets on the homepage

Overall, a clean and focused homepage design will help your page not only look good, but load quicker as well.

Optimize your WordPress database

This plugin lets you do just one simple task: optimize the your database (spam, post revisions, drafts, tables, etc.) to reduce their overhead.

We would also recommend the WP-DB Manager plugin, which can schedule dates for database optimization.

Disable hotlinking and leeching of your content

Hotlinking is a form of bandwidth “theft.” It occurs when other sites direct link to the images on your site from their articles making your server load increasingly high.

This can add up as more and more people “scrape” your posts or your site (and especially images) become more popular, as must do if you create custom images for your site on a regular basis.

An Expires header is a way to specify a time far enough in the future so that the clients (browsers) don’t have to re-fetch any static content (such as css file, javascript, images etc).

This way can cut your load time significantly for your regular users.

You need to copy and paste the following code in your root .htaccess file:

ExpiresActive On

ExpiresByType image/gif A2592000

ExpiresByType image/png A2592000

ExpiresByType image/jpg A2592000

ExpiresByType image/jpeg A2592000

Adjust Gravatar images

You’ll notice on this site that the default Gravatar image is set to… well, nothing.

This is not an aesthetic choice, it because it improves page loads by simply having nothing where there would normally be a goofy looking Gravatar logo or some other nonsense.

Some blogs go as far to disable them throughout the site, and for everyone.

You can do either, just know that it will at least benefit your site speed if you set the default image (found in “Discussion”, under the settings tab in the WordPress dashboard) to a blank space rather than a default image.

Add LazyLoad to your images

LazyLoad is the process of having only only the images above the fold load (i.e. only the images visible in the visitor’s browser window), then, when reader scrolls down, the other images begin to load, just before they come into view.

This will not only speed you page loads, it can also save bandwidth by loading less data for users who don’t scroll all the way down on your pages.

To do this automatically, install the jQuery Image Lazy Load plugin.

Control the amount of post revisions stored

WordPress, left to its own devices, would store every single one of these drafts, indefinitely.

Now, when this post is done and published, why would I need all of those drafts stored?

That’s why use the Revision Control plugin to make sure we keep post revisions to a minimum, set it to 2 or 3 so you have something to fall back on in case you make a mistake, but not too high that you clutter your backend with unnecessary amounts of drafted posts.

Turn off pingbacks and trackbacks

By default, WordPress interacts with other blogs that are equipped with pingbacks and trackbacks.

Every time another blog mentions you, it notifies your site, which in turn updates data on the post. Turning this off will not destroy the backlinks to your site, just the setting that generates a lot of work for your site.

For more detail, read this explanation of WordPress Pingbacks, Trackbacks and Linkbacks.

Replace PHP with static HTML, when necessary

This one is a little bit advanced, but can drastically cut down your load time if you are desperate to include page load speeds, so I included it.

Use CloudFlare

This is similar to the section above on using CDN’s, but I’ve become so fond of CloudFlare since we discussed it in my best web analytics post that decided to include it separately here.

To put it bluntly, CloudFlare, along with the W3 Total Cache plugin discussed above, are a really potent combination (they integrate with each other) that will greatly improve not only the speed, but the security of your site.